Fully integrated GenAI applications top the bill at Future of Content 2024
From advanced authoring support to automated print-page layout, Eidosmedia’s annual customer event showcased the practical application of generative AI and other digital news-media technologies.
Milan, Italy. June 24, 2024
“A large part of what we had to show our customers this year was AI-related,” said Massimo Barsotti, Eidosmedia CMO, “But by no means all. There are plenty of other areas where digital technology is simplifying and optimizing the business of news creation and delivery and our development teams have been active there too.”
“While last year’s event focused on the promise of GenAI applications, this year showed them fully functional and integrated into our newsroom workflows.”
AI productivity – fast, multi-model integration
Held in the Portuguese city of Porto, home to Eidosmedia’s new tech center, the meeting featured demos of the latest versions of Eidosmedia’s AI-driven productivity tools. These in-line authoring aids range from intelligent reviewing utilities to high quality text-generators offering translation, summarizing and key point extraction – all accessed within the authoring workspace so that authors can use them without breaking their ‘flow’.
The integration also gives the customer maximum freedom in the choice of AI models to adopt – each authoring function can be linked to a different AI engine. An ‘AI Service Layer’ streamlines integration of AI resources from popular LLMs to customized small language models (SLMs) for specialist tasks.
“Our approach is fully agnostic and multi-model,” said Eidosmedia CTO Cristiano Meda. “Since the field is evolving so fast, our emphasis is on giving customers the flexibility to respond as quickly as possible to new models and services as they become available.“
Page automation – state of the art
The meeting was also an opportunity for an update on the revolutionary AI-driven print-page layout solution that is cutting edition layout time from hours to minutes at Nordwest Zeitung and other publishers in Germany.
Customer stories
Italian business daily Il Sole 24 Ore was an early adopter of Eidosmedia technology and CTO Tim Price described how the title’s digital transformation is continuing with an advanced digital-first strategy, cloud migration and AI-driven productivity enhancement.
German media group SWMH publishes the Stuttgarter Zeitung and other regional print and digital titles. The group has been very active in the implementation of GenAI over the last year (including the print-page automation mentioned above). CTO Gregor Zoller provided an interesting look at the experience gained and the lessons learned.
Extreme editioning – 3.3 million copies, 400 variants
Also showcased at the meeting was a presentation of the remarkable case study of French weekly TV magazine Diverto. The magazine is bundled with 18 different newspapers. Its 400-plus content and advertising variants are managed using Eidosmedia’s planning and tracking solutions in combination with the mobile editorial and monitoring applications Swing and PageTrack.
Container revolution
In what was an (almost) AI-free part of the program, COO Holger Hofmann presented a major infrastructural innovation which will be implemented over the next year: the move to ‘containers’ for Eidosmedia platforms, both on-premise and cloud-hosted (using the powerful open-source Kubernetes management system).
The containerization of applications will bring an impressive range of technical and business benefits from faster and easier installations and upgrades to better security and enhanced scalability and portability.
“It’s all about business agility and speed,” said Holger, ”We’re talking about getting end-user benefits to our customers faster and in a more controlled way. “
Neon - next-generation digital
First announced to great interest at last year’s Future of Content, Neon , a new-generation CMS for digital news creation and delivery, had its first public demo at this year’s event. Product manager Aureliano Ventrella showed the ease and speed with which news content can be prepared, previewed and distributed to multi-site, multi-channel news operations.
Neon is a cloud-native containerized application deploying a number of advanced digital technologies from OpenSearch to Kubernetes. While providing a pure standalone digital publishing platform, Neon offers full backward compatibility with Méthode and other print-oriented solutions.
Filtering innovation
“The speed and range of technological change in the digital media field has made this one of the richest customer meetings we have held,” said Christian Pelanconi, Eidosmedia CEO. ”As always, our aim is to filter and select from this stream of innovation the technologies that can add most value to our customers’ operations. From the feedback we’ve received, it seems that this was particularly appreciated this year”.